...the nation's already badly damaged faith in the Supreme Court's ability to stand above politics is about to take another severe hit...

The "politics" of Obamacare is that no Republican voted for it. Krugman and other Statists demand that SCOTUS "stand above politics" now, but were cheering when Pelosi-Reid-Obama crammed this down America's throat.

“But it’s hard not to feel a sense of foreboding  and to worry that the nation’s already badly damaged faith in the Supreme Court’s ability to stand above politics is about to take another severe hit.”

Generally when I read lamea$$ ignorant arguments like this, I suggest that the idiot forwarding them is purposely missing the point he or she is contending with; however, given the complete sociopathic and intellectual incapacity of this Krugman creature, it is best to simply ignore it and write it off as the pointless ranting of a self-aggrandizing socialist a$$ clown.

You are right. Health insurance isn’t broccoli...AND THAT WAS HIS ENTIRE POINT.

Sheez. The idea is that if the government can force you to buy aone product because you need ot for your health and for regulatory purposes, then they can force you to buy other products for the same reasons.

Broccoli is “good for you” if the new “Health Care mafia” decided brocoli was “good for you” and needed to be regulated, they could force you to buy ot for those purposes too...or any other item that could possibly be fit into those broad categories.

Comversly, if they can force you to buy something for these reasons, they would also inherit the power to ban products for the same reason and tell you what NOT to buy.

Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don't make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don't buy health insurance until they get sick  which is what happens in the absence of a mandate  the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn't work, and never has.

But when people don't buy health insurance until they get sick  which is what happens in the absence of a mandate  the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain.

Exactly! Which is why we must force young, healthy people to buy insurance they won't use.

So now that they're paying into Social Security that they'll never collect and health insurance they don't want and won't use, maybe they'll get a clue and vote against Obama this time?

Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don't make broccoli unavailable to those who want it.

What an idiotic statement. The supply of broccoli is just as unlimited as the supply of insurance policies. The purchase of a broccoli spear does not make broccoli "unavailable" to any subsequent broccoli seeker.

But when people don't buy health insurance until they get sick  which is what happens in the absence of a mandate...

Actually the people who don't buy health insurance, and get sick, generally speaking don't buy health insurance even after they get sick, certainly not because they got sick-this is because health CARE, which they receive, is not health INSURANCE.

The analogy fails because lefties cannot grasp that health care is not health insurance.

Supreme Court Justices: Are Justices, Senators, and Representatives required to sign-up for ObamaCare, or do they get special treatment and so they are exempt?

My thoughts:

I believe that ObamaCare is one big mess.

Still, I wish we could do something so that we average people can be covered by some type of health insurance that was affordable and inexpensive.

For instance, average income people could purchase $10,000 to $20,000 coverage, and then the government would kick in with catastrophic coverage once the medical bills were more than $20,000.

$20,000 coverage would take care of routine visits to the doctor and a few emergency room visits per year.

Serious tests and sicknesses---like cancer and heart problems---would be covered by government catastrophic insurance.

People with no income, such as homeless people: We should try to come up with a special program where they can get basic care until they can get back on their feet and pay for some of the coverage.

We have got to do something to help the less fortunate to get health coverage, but sad to say, ObamaCare is not the answer, because its 2,000 plus pages are nothing but pages of confusion after confusion.

Holy Moly!! I've never seen someone miss a point so badly in my life!! This idiot, like so many others in this nation do not understand the simple concept of FREEDOM and FREE WILL as guaranteed by our Constitution.

The point is simple, if Health Insurance becomes a required purchase because Constitutional precepts allow for it, then wouldn't the same logic hold up in any other case for ANYTHING the gov't mandated the public buy?

This would mean the gov't has complete control over our lives when the Constitution was written to ensure the PEOPLE had complete control over the gov't!

The whole point Scalia was making is Broccoli is healthy, therefore would the gov't then have a Constitutional basis to force people to buy it and eat it because it would prevent certain diseases?

16
posted on 03/31/2012 6:45:53 AM PDT
by sirchtruth
(Freedom is not free.)

A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1] To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.[1][2]

Another a$$hat that doesn’t know that unlimited power leads to unlimited abuse. If the Commerce Clause has no limits, the government can indeed force you to eat brocolli, buy a Chevy Volt, dictate how much alcohol you can drink, what size house you can buy, etc.

I really don’t care what they decide, I REFUSE to obey. I will not fund abortions.

18
posted on 03/31/2012 6:50:16 AM PDT
by NTHockey
(Rules of engagement #1: Take no prisoners)

No, Justice Scalia has it exactly right. If the mandate provision of Obamcare stands as constitutional, it immensely broadens to power of the federal government under the commerce clause and would allow Congress to pass laws that could mandate that citizens must do something, whether it be to buy broccoli, drive an electric car or have a government regulated thermostat in their homes. Imagine with this new power a liberal Congress could pass a law that all gun owners must buy a government designed liability insurance policy that would make it prohibitive to own a gun. It wouldn't take much of a stretch for Congress to invoke the commerce clause as a reason to ban talk radio. This mandate is a dangerous new expansion of government power that opens the door to absolute tyranny.

20
posted on 03/31/2012 6:55:21 AM PDT
by The Great RJ
("The problem with socialism is that pretty soon you run out of other people's money" M. Thatcher)

I don’t necessarily agree with your conclusions, but you did bring up an interesting problem: is health care, or health insurance, too expensive for the average American? I don’t know, but it would be interesting to see how much it cost if current insurance policies were restricted to catastrophic cases and most people paid out of pocket for lesser problems. The fly in the ointment is that nowhere in the constitution does it state that the government must provide any of the necessities. Health care is of great importance, but not any more important than food, clothing, and shelter. If the government can force a person to buy health insurance, they can pretty much force them to buy anything it thinks necessary.

Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don't make broccoli unavailable to those who want it

Actually, if a lot of people decide not to buy broccoli then fewer farmers will plant it, importers will import it off season and fewer stores will stock it. By not buying it, I might make it more expensive for others to buy and thus price other buyers out of the market depending on how elastic the supply is and what quantity efficiencies are no longer available. For example, compare the price and availability of iceberg lettuce vs. arugula.

Also, Krugman, the real point is that neither broccoli nor health insurance is a power given to Congress in article I, section 8 of the Constitution no matter how important you think one or the other is.

29
posted on 03/31/2012 7:20:25 AM PDT
by KarlInOhio
(You only have three billion heartbeats in a lifetime.How many does the government claim as its own?)

If health insurance were actually insurance, what we call "catastrophic coverage" only, then medical costs would be a small fraction of what they are now because our medical dollars would go to 100% to medical treatment rather than a very large % to government bureaucrats and private bureaucrats who have to live better than the average and must waste a large % of the % that they suck out of consumers' pockets.

Health Insurance as exists today is not insurance at all. It is a prepayment plan for medical treatment and a welfare plan to maintain government and private organizations and parasites superfluous employees.

That comparison horrified health care experts all across America because health insurance is nothing like broccoli.

It just occurred to me that Alinsky's rules are being used not be a few but by the majority on the left. First government, hand-picked scholars, and pundits ridicule the target then the msm perpetuates it non-stop.

It's past time for us to start fighting back. We need to research everyone who is using ridicule to shut out their enemy. Then we need to humble them publicly as they've done to so many others.

Start with Paul Krugman. Does his expertise on the economy extend to law? Does he even understand the question before the Court, that it's not about the economy but our basic liberty? Yes, he and the others know but they're trying to latch onto the broccoli piece to (1) ridicule Scalia and (2) turn Obamacare into an economic argument. They can't win on the freedom argument and they know it.

I am so sick of this but people will never get it if we just generalize about Alinsky's rules, we need to fight fire with fire.

Food is no different than medicine because food changes your body. Broccoli and beef and chicken and wine and twinkies all change your body chemistry. Therefore, you could make the case that food is no different than pharmaceuticals.

Take the pill? Eat your broccoli? What’s the difference? Not much. The government could very well declare Twinkies as dangerous as a cigarette. And demand that we pre-approve our grocery lists. Although for some reason they are trying to legalize marijuana. So it’s all very confusing.

And anything applies to things outside of health care. I have an 11 year old Ford Focus. I love my car. It runs really well and still gets decent gas mileage. I want to drive it till it dies and I plan to replace it with a newer...Ford Focus. I’d love to have a Fiesta diesel but they aren’t available in the states (96 mpg on the highway!)

At some point my car could be forced of the road because it doesn’t meet “today’s” standards. After some byzantine formula looking at my income, housing, quotas, and all sorts of other stuff, the usual way to figure benefits, I might get the choice of a Chevy Volt and the bus.

It seems a little tin foil hat, but I never imagined a world where I couldn’t decide whether I could pay out of pocket or had to use insurance to get a service. The car insurance argument is moot, since many small accidents are settled out of pocket to keep the insurance companies out of it.

>> if a lot of people decide not to buy broccoli then fewer farmers will plant it <<

Correct. But IMO the statement really misses a crucially important point:

If somebody doesn't eat broccoli and other green vegetables, then his HEALTH (not necessarily his health insurance) is likely to suffer. And when anybody's health suffers, the marginal effect is to make health costs go up for everybody.

So to keep health costs low, the "progressive" mindset presumably holds that the federal government has a rational basis to require that everybody engage in the specific type of interstate commerce which deals with green vegetables.

In other words, the controversy keeps boiling down to the question,

Does the federal government have the power to force people to engage in a specific kind of interstate commerce (buying green vegetables) in order to "regulate" another kind of interstate commerce (health services and/or health insurance).

To paraphrase an infamous former POTUS:

It all depends on what the meaning of "regulate" is.

In other words, is it really "regulation" of one sort of interstate commerce (health services) when the feds require somebody de novo to engage in another sort of interstate commerce (health insurance and/or vegetables). Of course not!

So to keep health costs low, the "progressive" mindset presumably holds that the federal government has a rational basis to require that everybody engage in the specific type of interstate commerce which deals with green vegetables. In other words, the controversy keeps boiling down to the question, Does the federal government have the power to force people to engage in a specific kind of interstate commerce (buying green vegetables) in order to "regulate" another kind of interstate commerce (health services and/or health insurance).

Some health professionals seem to believe that the government should sponsor their efforts to counter the self-interested efforts of others (nutrition and diet quacks for example) because they are right and the others are wrong, because they are altruistic and the others are not. It may be true that they are factually correct and genuinely altruistic, and that what they wish to do will have a beneficial effect on many people, but it doesnt follow necessarily that the government should fund them.

This is a manifestation of a widespread phenomenon brought about by the advent of the secularized state. Instead of viewing the state as a limited means to a limited end, the tendency has been to imbue it, a temporal entity, with the attributes of a transcendent final judgment in which all injustices and inequalities are finally rectified. In this way, the secular state has been categorically, though not personally, deified and expected to act accordingly (something of a diffuse divine right of kings).

This is seen in those who believe the necessary response to a social ill is the passage of a law, especially a federal law, and the enactment of a program, especially one that they can devise and administrate (and that not necessarily for cynical reasons). Those who feel they are on the side of right, certain they arent acting against societys interest, often appeal to the State to aid them in their struggle against evil. Since the spirit of the secular state is money and power, they ask to be endowed accordingly. Its pathetically naive and dangerous.

Power accumulates power. Government grows until it meets a limit, either a systemic one (Constitutional limits), or a fiscal one (limits imposed by the amount of money it is able to generate or extort from its own citizens or those outside), or a social one (limits provided by massive societal non-compliance or armed insurrection or by other countries response to aggression or perceived weakness). Even then it still has great power to drain resources and people from productive enterprise and turn them to its own ends. In this way it is functioning as a parasite living off the body politic.

Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don't make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don't buy health insurance until they get sick  which is what happens in the absence of a mandate  the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn't work, and never has.

Paul, you friggin moron, there is no unregulated health insurance anywhere in the United States. And Obamacare has already resulted in making insurance more expensive and unaffordable. So what you fear, doesn't exist and what you prescribe has resulted in what you fear. We need Nobel prize winners like you like we need Nobel prize winners like Algore, Arafat, and Barack Hussein Obama.

Aha, see? That’s the problem right there. Broccoli comes in florets, asparagus in spears. I suggest a two-week stay in Camp Analogy where they will help you rectify this confusion. Don’t worry...analogy rehab will be covered under 0bamacare.

48
posted on 03/31/2012 9:11:25 AM PDT
by Attention Surplus Disorder
(The only economic certainty: When it all blows up, Krugman will say we didn't spend enough.)

“So to keep health costs low, the “progressive” mindset presumably holds that the federal government has a rational basis to require that everybody engage in the specific type of interstate commerce which deals with green vegetables.”

People with no income, such as homeless people: We should try to come up with a special program where they can get basic care until they can get back on their feet and pay for some of the coverage.

Christian Hospitals and organizations used to do this. In many areas, they still do. Unfortunately, the Progressive/Communist/Statist collective are working overtime to stop this.

If a private activity can collect donations and provide direct assistance, without government interference, they are able to do the work of Jesus, the King of kings and Lord of lords. The demonic butt sniffers in DC can't tolerate that.

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